Friday, 8 June 2012

InfoWorld : The battle to stop Amazon Web Services starts here

InfoWorld : The battle to stop Amazon Web Services starts here!

Piston Computing's integration with VMware's Cloud Foundry surprised many, but you should expect more anti-AWS efforts...

Piston Computing plans to build a bridge to EMC VMware's Cloud Foundry, meaning it will link Piston's own OpenStack-based cloud IaaS offering. What does this mean for cloud development? It's the start of many other such integration efforts, I suspect, to battle the meteoric rise of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cloud Foundry is a popular open source platform service, which VMware promotes as a PaaS for any infrastructure. Piston is one of many companies that rely on OpenStack. The OpenStack fraternity includes Akamai, AMD, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, CloudScaling, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, NTT, Rackspace, and Yahoo. The OpenStack movement is really a competitive pushback on AWS in the IaaS space. Both Cloud Foundry and Piston's OpenStack are available under the Apache 2 license.

If you're working on an enterprise cloud computing strategy, you should be well aware that relationships such as the Piston/VMware deal are forged for the economic benefit of both companies by making the combination more attractive than either offering on its own. That's why we'll see more and more such IaaS/PaaS partnerships or even acquisitions in the next 18 months -- especially involving other OpenStack providers.

The rationale is obvious: AWS is eating everyone's lunch, so now is the time to pile on. If AWS were not doing so well in the market, you wouldn't see many of these partnerships -- trust me.

What's an enterprise cloud guy to do? Use these partnerships to your advantage. No matter what the motivation, they open up new paths to cloud computing success, both private and public. As everyone teams up to defeat AWS, the prices should fall and the breadth of the technology stacks should increase.